For his directorial debut, Russell Crowe has delivered exactly what you probably expected. The Water Diviner is loud, brash, emotionally manipulative and occasionally plain ludicrous. But it is also stuffed with uncomplicated humanity and Saturday-afternoon good spirits. Crowe looks to have made the picture he genuinely wanted to make.

The Water Diviner concerns the creation myth of modern Australia: the assault on Gallipoli during the first World War. Inspired by a fragment of a true story, the film casts Crowe as Joshua Connor, an apparently successful farmer – and water diviner – in the remote outback. During a beautifully shot, dusty, rusty opening act, we watch as his three sons grow, sign up for the army and, like so many of their compatriots, get killed in the infamous battle. Following his wife's suicide, Connor decides to make for Turkey to locate the boys' remains.

Here’s where the film really plunges into narrative and visual cliche. In Istanbul an archetypal good-natured waif charms Connor and leads him a to an anachronistic boutique hotel where his mother (Olga Kurylenko) – young enough to be Crowe’s daughter, of course – waits to become the love interest. You won’t need to be told that virtually all the English officers turn out to be shits and that the only friendly face in the His Majesty’s forces is attached to a Scottish body.

And yet. Something interesting is going on here. In works such as Peter Weir's Gallipoli we have heard much about supposed British betrayals. The Water Diviner is rare in that it makes a sincere attempt to engage with the Turkish experience. The occasionally ropy battle sequences allow both sides their tragedies and their moments of brutality.

It’s a shame the film eventually spins off into utter, unmitigated absurdity. Mind you, if you are in search of national mythologies on the grandest scale, nothing will beat the scene in which Russell takes on a small army with just a cricket bat.